


one to ten we're all the same

by setaxis



Series: Mama powers au [1]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - MAMA (Music Video), Gen, I'm sorry I just wanted ot10 for this, Self-Indulgent, Suicidal Thoughts, ot10 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 07:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3601875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/setaxis/pseuds/setaxis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mama powers drabble</p>
            </blockquote>





	one to ten we're all the same

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know what to call this. It's just a piece I wrote as a stream of consciousness. I may add little other snippets to this, I might not. This is only ten members as (while I do not hate Luhan and Kris and wish them all the best) sometimes I don't feel like including them as they are not _technically_ part of EXO any more. None of the members are named here but I hope it's obvious who is who

**Warnings:** Mentions of suicidal thoughts

 

i.  
He feels the heat spiralling up through his bones into his blood. It hurts. It aches. It feels like someone’s trying to rip him apart from the inside out, atom by atom, but he doesn’t want it to stop because this is the part he likes the most – the part where he feels most like a monster.

And just like that he blinks out of existence.

 

ii.

He has always been a sickly kid. It started when broke his arm falling from the playground climbing frame when he was eight and everything seemed to go downhill from there. He’s pale and desperately thin no matter what his mother tries to feed him. His aunt often comments he looks like one of these days the wind will pick him up and blow him away.

He wishes it would.

 

iii.

The first time he breaks someone’s bones he throws up. He hadn’t barely touched them, just a little tap with his foot when they’d been particularly annoying but then there’s a sickening crack and everything goes wrong. He remembers bright white emerging from a mess of red like an iceberg from a bloody sea and then he’s losing his lunch, spewing orange bile across the grass. He remembers the colours swirling all together – red, white, green, orange – before all is reduced to black.

When he wakes up he’s in his own room, with the yellow glow-in-the-dark stars his dad put up on his ceiling and the taste of vomit strong in his mouth.

From that day forward he vows never to touch anyone again.

 

iv.

In his hometown it snows all year round, an eternal winter confined only to the valley he himself has never ventured outside. His classmates tell him stories of their family holidays to the coast – the bright blue of the sky stretching endless into the horizon, the warmth of the sun as it shines down blazing in its intensity – and he listens with wide eyes and open expression. He wants to know everything. The wind burns his skin, bitter and biting – is that what the burning sun would feel like? The ice on the pond sometimes looks almost blue, if he magnified that by a thousand would that be what the sky looks like?

He has so many questions he wants answers for. He asks his mother when they can leave for their summer holiday to see the sky and the sea and the sun but the answer is never the one he’s hoping for. It’s always the same. Always no. Always-

_Hell will freeze over before you can leave this valley._

 

v.

He doesn’t have any friends. He’s never had any friends because there’s something about being the kid that sweats so much he goes through three or four shirts a day that gets you alienated pretty thoroughly. They don’t care that he’s nice, or that he really doesn’t smell, all they see is _weird_ and _gross_.

School is lonely and tiring. He goes only because his mother says he has to and every day he waits for it to end like an inmate waiting for their sentence to be up. The only thing he looks forward to is when he draws a bath in the evening and he slides under the water, completely submerged, because under the water he is not some sweaty freak. He is clean, he is warm. The water surrounds him in its embrace, pressing on him from all sides, and he is calm. At peace.

He stays in for hours and hours but never once does his skin get wrinkly like his mother says it will if he stays in the bath for too long. He thinks bitterly that it’s because it’s so used to being damp, what could a bit more do?

 

vi.

The saying goes that time is precious but he’s never really understood that. Time always seems to go so slowly for him, the hours crawling past, that he can’t believe anyone could find anything so abundant precious. Time isn’t like diamonds or gold. Time isn’t rare.

It isn’t until he gets to university and his first physics lecture that he realises that while time may not be short for him, it might not be that way for everyone. He’d never thought about it before: the possibility that his time is different. It’s amazing and scary at the same time.

Time is relative. Fascinating.

 

vii.

He doesn’t leave his house after dark. The darkness is huge and black and suffocating and every step he takes into it he feels like he’s disappearing, like it’s eating him up. It makes him feel small, weak. When he was little his parents told him that he was being silly, that there was nothing hiding in the darkness, and he hadn’t had the words to explain that it wasn’t what might be lurking in the darkness that scared him.

He doesn’t know how to explain that he was made for the light, made to have it soak up into his skin until he practically _glows_ with it, is _drunk_ with it. He _is_ light, and the darkness is his enemy.

 

viii.

Nothing works for him. Nothing than runs on electricity anyway. As soon as he touches it the whole thing seems to spontaneously combust, fizzing and sparking and generally giving up the ghost. He’s not allowed to touch the toaster after it jumped across the room and nearly made his father toast. He’s not allowed to work the tv because after the last two copped it his parents have decided if the next one breaks they aren’t getting a new one. He can’t play video games or have a phone.

And it only gets worse. The day he turns sixteen the fuel spark on the school bus fails. The year after the power blows for the entire neighbourhood when he switches on the lights.

The year after he gets hit by lightning…

and survives.

 

ix.

He has always spent more time with flowers than he has with human beings. They’re pretty, easy to keep happy and when they die, he can bring them back to life. He doesn’t know how he does it. All he knows is that all he needs is one touch and brown, withered stems become green and new once again.

He imagines it sometimes, what it would be like to touch old, tan, wrinkled skin and make it new and young again. How the withered bones would stretch out straight under his fingertips. He wonders if it would work the same it does with his plants.

But he doesn’t allow himself to wonder for long. Everyone says plants are simple things compared to a human being who can think and reason and feel, don’t they? Something as easy and simple as a plant takes him half a day to recover from. He has to remind himself every time he sees someone hurt – a broken leg from falling from a tree, deep gashes from an attack, cancer – he daren’t try. He might not recover at all.

 

x.

His therapist says it’s normal to feel anger. She says that everyone experiences it to varying degrees and that his problem is not his anger but that he can’t control it. Well, respectfully, his therapist can take it and shove it where the sun don’t shine. He doesn’t think anyone feels rage the way he does – an ever-present fire than boils under his skin. It feels like an itch he cannot scratch. It feels like his insides are burning with it. It _hurts_.

Sometimes the pain is so bad he goes looking for trouble – doesn’t matter what kind as long as there’s fear and adrenaline and release – and he knows the type of name he’s making for himself. He knows it’s not good. He knows that’s not really him. He knows he’s making his life harder but it feels like the only way he can breathe is in those moments when he’s lying flat on his back, all the rage beaten out of him.

To get home from school – when he goes – he has to cross the river and every day he stops on the bridge and looks down into the dark, fathomless waters. Some days they are still and some days they swirl angrily and he wonders whether if he dived into them they would quench the fire inside him or merely make it worse.

 


End file.
